Telecom equipments vendor Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) Tuesday claimed its billing solution –– charge@once mediate –had reached milestone having signed up its 125th customer last week. Vodafone Malta is said to be the latest customer.

The solution, launched two years ago at the Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) in Barcelona, is designed for simplifying billing and enabling the rollout of new mobile data services. To put it in few words, the billing platform brings transparency to the bill that carriers hand over to prepaid and postpaid customers.

For carriers, the usage data collected and processed by the platform supports many purposes such as statistics, fraud detection, business intelligence and customer care.

Charge@once mediate acts as a single point of contact between all kinds of network elements, providing charging and billing data to support prepaid and postpaid customers as well as all kinds of convergent voice and data services. It converts and validates data in real time, so that receiving systems work without hiccups.

In Europe, surprising large charges on cell phone bills is dubbed ‘bill shock’. In April 2009, the European Parliament voted in favor of a new legislation to cut roaming charges and introduce measures to prevent ‘bill shock’ and save travelers money. NSN says it platform avoids “bill shock”.

Marco Incorvaja, billing and data warehouse manager at Vodafone (News - Alert) Malta, said his company turned to NSN solution as part of offering additional data services to subscribers.

The platform also removes the need for large integration projects for each new service, enabling a greater flexibility in tariffs and marketing strategies. Deployments are further helped by the pre-integration with other NSN products and easy integration with third-party systems.

 “In a highly competitive market in the mobile Internet space, faster time-to-market for new services is the key to achieving customer satisfaction,” said Kevin Wall, head of sales for charging, billing and care solutions at Nokia Siemens (News - Alert) Networks.